Many people all over the world carry multiple devices such as cell phones, laptops or tablets which communicate with many other devices through wireless communication networks. In addition, the number of devices or machines enabled for connectivity to cellular or other wireless network services for machine-to-machine applications, such as telematics devices in automobiles or devices enabled for monitoring and reporting on such things as patient health or utilities, or used for tracking assets, is growing exponentially. The cellular technologies and core network elements that are in use today were originally designed for handling human voice traffic from a number of devices that correlated more closely with the actual number of individual subscribers, straining the ability of network management entities, such as services that receive location information and authenticate devices connecting to a network (for example, home subscriber servers or HSS), that control device activity (referred to as policy and charging rules functions, or PCRF), or that process device activity (often referred to as a gateway), as well as core network switches and databases that store subscriber profiles and activity data not only to handle actual device traffic but also to receive, store and use the exploding quantities of status and activity data generated by those devices.
This fundamental shift in numbers of connected devices has very significant implications for being able effectively to manage data relating to these devices. In addition, as the number of data points to be managed, such as subscriber activity information, subscriber device location change, etc., also increases, requirements for data management systems to be used by network operators in operating networks and providing desirable services to subscribers have increased tremendously as well, in terms of capacity for handling data volume, complexity of the data and the sheer number of associated transactions.
However, the cellular technology still in use is optimized for handling voice data or ordinary “texting”, or short messages (SMS), activities, from human subscribers with a single device, not the load on networks in terms of numbers of connected devices and numbers of transactions per device caused by the multiplication of devices owned by individual consumers or for the data-intensive activities of these consumer devices. Furthermore cellular technology is not optimized for the explosion in the number of devices used in machine-to-machine communications. These new demands can exceed the ability of networks that are designed to meet the needs of a limited number of consumer devices, and that operate with back end systems using current versions of relational databases, to efficiently manage the large amounts of data or numbers of transactions.
Accordingly, what is desired is a method and system that overcomes the above-identified issues. The present invention addresses this need.